Mistakes While Making Keto Diets — Make Your Keto More Effective
When it comes to ketogenic diet or keto in short, it’s the topic grabbing most of the spotlight from fitness niche, due to low carbs, moderate protein and high in dietary fats. If its Hollywood celebs or fitness stars, all are touting to their follower about keto diet benefits like energy boost, fast reduction in inflammation and fat burning.
Keto is not just about loosing weight — it also aid or boost healing process and is mostly popular in cancer patients, epilepsy and stabilizing blood sugar in diabetic patients.
People adapt keto lifestyle to loose body weight but I went for it to increase mine, when I went through biotoxin illness and got skinny. Consuming healthy fats from grass-fed butter and MCT oil, I begain to feel better and my brain healed quickly.
When its ketogenic lifestyle, men and women should approach it differently. In this article, I am mainly focusing specially on mistakes women make when approaching keto.
What is the Keto Diet and The word Ketosis?
Keto diet is adequate-protein, high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet that transforms the process of producing energy in your body in a different way.
When you plan to fast or restrict carbohydrates in other words, human body enters in a natural metabolic condition which is Ketosis. Where body burns glucose (sugar) to produce energy, Keto diet toggles the body to burn fat.
When glucose storage in the body diminishes, Ketones are generated in the liver, that is more specific, targeted and efficient method to generate energy in body.
Ketosis is triggers in the body when you eat less than 50 grams of carbs per day and it takes just 3 to 4 days ketosis comes into action. Alternatively, when you fast for 3 to 4 days ketosis activates,
Why is the Keto Diet Different for Women?
When It comes to women body it reacts wholly different to keto diet due to different hormones as compare to men.
Due to those hormones, women body is more sensitive to stress signals then men, and it is due to fertilization factors.
When fasting or preventing carbs to enter, women bodies rapidly starts lacking food, and the brain gets signal that body is starving and body starts eating fats which triggers the fat burning.
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Mistakes Women do While Making Keto Diet
1. Eating too Many Carbs
In general we are more reluctant to carbohydrates, not surprisingly, most of give up quickly.
But the thing to take serious is that refined and excessive carbohydrates quickly converts to sugar and causes body to react with insulin ejection.
To most of us, it is not a big deal, but with the passage of time, our body inflames and becomes resistive to insulin response leading to unregulated sugar levels.
In Keto diet the carbs are regulated to amount of 50 grams (or 5% of the diet) per day. Carbs are strictly regulated to be low in amount we consume.
Mostly non-starchy vegetables are the source of carbs in keto diet and the amount of sugar comes from low-sugar fruites like berries.
Snakbars and Nuts contains huge amount of hidden carbs. On one hand there are healthy fats in nuts but also inhabits carbs, eating it much is so easy. Most of ‘healthy’ snakbars and energy bars also contain nuts and dry fruites. On labels, they clearly mention, and its shocking to find a huge amount of grams of carbs they have.
No I am not saying you have to give up carbs entirely and forever — its only at initial stage when you are about to go for keto. You can get relatively more carbs later when you adapt keto.
2. Completely Avoiding Enough Healthy Fats
Fat in the body is main source of fuel — but healthy fat. Keto diet is fat-rich diet. When carbs are eliminated, they should be replaced with healthy fats — about 70% of the whole diet. Fat will be main source of energy.
From our childhood, we are forced to believe fat as a bad thing and is dangerous for body, but researchers are admitting that its not the case — Its not the fat, but toxicity and sugar that makes us fat and sick. But this faith is difficult to overcome since conventional medical practitioners are thrusting the same old low-fat idea.
Major Source of Healthy Fats
- Grass-fed meats
- Olives
- Coconut/MCT oil
- Fatty fish, such as salmon
- Avocados
- Pastured eggs
- Grass-fed butter
3. Consuming Excessive Protein
When we say Keto is moderate protein it means its about 20% in the whole diet, and that protein is not meant to be loaded with ingredients like cheese and meat.
Eating more protein itself is not a big issue as its not too much carbs or fat, but surplus amount of protein that is more than body requirements converts to glucose and eventually slows down or even stops your body from getting into process of ketosis.
Protein requirements for body differ from person to person — considering factors like body weight, the activity you perform and the most important thing, your health.
4. Eating Less Food or Low-Quality Food
When we eat not as much of food as our body requires, the body starts getting into starvation mode, and we can clearly feel it through symptoms like irritation, headaches, stomach problem and sleep disturbances — termed as “Keto-Flue”.
When going for keto, first few weeks are important, it may be nuisance for you because you may possibly go through keto flu — as body is adapting to keto and it is switching to burn fat instead of sugar as it usually do.
So when you are ready to keto, make sure you consume more water than usual and in combination of sodium, magnesium and potassium to decrease the chances of keto-flu.
The main participants on the keto diet menu are the foods like healthy fats, big bunch of vegetables, protein that is pasture-raised, grass-fed and etc.
Eating processed foods during keto is not going to get you expected results as that food is going to slow down or stop ketosis due to inflammation it creates in the body.
Even if it doesn’t look, it’s a huge supply of hidden carbs and sugars. Furthermore processed foods mostly contain conventional animal products, refined vegetable oil, and artificial sweeteners.
Yes it looks like I am obsessing over diet, but its not. Its probably a good plan to keep track of what your body is going to consume for at least the first week on keto diet. After that its not going to be a big deal to hack and track. In my case when I started to switch to ketogenic lifestyle, I did not even notice I consumed way too much of everything.
I will suggest this simple keto diet tracking app Cronometer which is going take all the pain of tracking every bits and pieces.
Go vegetable heavy. Reverse the psychology of your plate by making meat the side dish and vegetables the main course.
5. Switching Too Quickly But Not Gradually
Usually when you are not on keto diet, your body burns carbs to produce energy, and then you suddenly prevent or take away those carbs which your body was used to. During keto, you are forcing your body to switch the mode and let it burn fats not the carbs.
The body response to this sudden change will be a noticeable stress that may lead you not to feel good which is decisive moment, either you bear it, or you give up thinking its not going to work for you.
Moreover, bodies that are already tuned to unhealthy diet, they may find it difficult to transition to burn fat because they already have damaged metabolism to consume fats by properly burning it.
So it’s all about educating yourself how you can gradually transition your metabolism in 3–4 weeks without going through stress. I would suggest you plan such as Mark Sisson’s The Keto Reset Diet: Reboot Your Metabolism in 21 Days and Burn Fat Forever.
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6. Sudden Intermittent Fasting
Intermittent Fasting is a process that results in the same outcomes when preventing carbs, and is applied mostly in combination to keto, by the same individuals struggling to switch their body into ketosis mode.
In its core, intermittent fasting is a process of preventing eating for at-least an 8 hours time span (Skipping breakfast is usual in most of the people to cover up 8 hours fasting).
Stretching the time span between dinner and breakfast is the best way to implement intermittent fasting. As we are sleeping, or body is fasting anyway, increasing the time window in between helps achieve it.
People who are not consuming healthy food, they will want to wait until their body switch its mode from burning crabs to burning fat before going for prolonged and perpetuated intermittent fasting.
Both keto and fasting together in parallel may be a way more stress for your body and you will be ambiguous about which one of both is actively producing paramount and noticeable results.
7. Staying in Ketosis All the Time
The stats shows, for first couple of months women feel good on keto diet and then start feeling bad. Dave Asprey explains in this article that majority of women performs well when on “cyclical” ketogenic diet, in other words toggling/ switching in and out the body in ketosis, for example, days when they consume some carbs and the other day they get rid of it with intermittent fasting.
8. Ketone Levels Obsession
If its not any medical reason you are on keto diet, it is not compulsory to track or meter ketone levels in your body. But if you are keen and have time, you can measure the keytones. Usually its very easy and the tool for it is blood glucose monitor. Alternative method is urine stripes but that is not much accurate way when compare to blood glucose monitor.
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9. Taking Too Much Stress
Like other, you might be going through lots of stress before going on keto.
If it’s the case, I won’t suggest you to go on keto before you tackle with the primary sources of stress.
So I would discus about some common stress types: the first one is mental and physical stress. Stress can disturb the hormones in the body which in turn confuses the brain and body which averts it from burning fat even if you are on proper keto diet.
The next stress I want to discuss is lack of Quality Sleep which puts your body into extreme pressure. It irregulates the appetite and hunger harmons called leptin and gherlin and also increase insulin which means more fats.
The next stress type may seem strange to you and it cause your body store fats when doing excessive exercise.
Surprisingly, less exercise can get you better results than engaging your muscles in extreme elastic tension.
Daily exercise can stress muscles and its better to give a break to let the body heal the muscles and recover from tissue damages if in case.
10. Obsessing Over Scale
In my opinion, no scale in the world shows perfectly about muscle gains or about the health you have, so keeping track of progress this way is not a good idea.
The thing matters is how you look and feel yourself and how fit your clothes are according to your preference.
We differ from other people one way or other, so from the same keto diet, we wont all get the same outcome.
Final Thoughts
Getting used to any new method of eating, changing diet plans and adapting to it takes some time. No particular way of eating may best fit everyone’s preference.
Irrespective of weather you are vegan, paleo or keto, anyone eating healthy fats and non-starchy vegetable you can get the same benefits as others can get.
The most important thing to adjust your body according to what you listen from it.
I am hoping this article will aid you in succeeding on keto diet. If you find it helpful, I would love hear from you in comments.
